Our guest author this week is Rabbinic Intern Shawn Weiss, Ziegler Rabbinical School student and Alumni Fellow of the Flesh Family Sinai Temple Israel Center Rabbinical School Fellowship.

There is a verse in this week’s combined Torah portion of Hukkat-Balak that is as profound to me today as it was the first time I encountered it over ten years ago. Let me set the scene: Balak, King of the Moabites, has seen what the Israelites have done to the neighboring Amorites. He is afraid the Israelites will soon come and destroy he and his kingdom, too. As a defensive measure, Balak hires Balaam, a non-Jewish diviner with proven record of direct communication with God—the very same God who has promised (and obligated) the Israelites so much. He is hoping Balaam will curse the Israelites, thus removing them as a perceived threat. Balaam has other ideas. He tells Balak that he can’t just curse God’s blessed people willy-nilly. He must first commune with God, to learn from Him if Balak’s wish is something that he may carry out. The answer, as we know, is repeatedly no. Balaam may not curse God’s blessed ones, no matter how many riches Balak is willing to pay him. In an attempt to change Balaam’s mind, Balak takes Balaam to Bamoth-baal, a local mountaintop, so that he may see with his own eyes the mass of Israelites moving towards his kingdom. “From there,” the Torah tells us, “he could see a portion of the people” (Numbers 22:41). Balaam’s mountaintop glimpse of the People Israel is the first moment in the Torah when we, too, see the Israelites from afar, as if from the perspective of an outsider, a non-Jew. But Balaam doesn’t see all of the people; he merely sees a portion of the people. The Hebrew word for portion is ka-tze (kuf-tsade-heh). Another English translation for ka-tze is edge, border, outskirts. It is a profound moment, because, after all the miracles and visions and divine interventions the Israelites (and we) experience during their journey from Egypt to Canaan, this is the moment when the very fact of the people’s existence is itself the miracle, manifest as a material fact of this world. Balak need not fear them; he merely needs to allow them to pass through. But in seeing the Israelites as the enemy, an entity to be destroyed rather than reckoned with, Balak creates an ultimately unnecessary dynamic by which he and his people are destroyed.